Welcome to my blog. I home school Jenson and Wren, who are 6 and 4 years old respectively. We live in Cheltenham in England with my husband, Simon, and all manner of animals including chickens, rabbits, a dog and a handful of fish. This is an online diary. It's a place for me to keep a record of the highs and lows of our home ed experience.

Our super story telling themed week has been so much fun. The children have really enjoyed all the projects I've given them and with Simon's input in the evenings, it has been a good Team Skeff effort!

After the festival workshops and the intense story telling episodes using our Lego Education set, we spent the latter half of the week focusing on more craft based projects. First up were pop up books. Such was the children's enthusiasm, they had got themselves dressed, fed themselves breakfast and brushed their own teeth so that by 8am they were ready and raring to go!

We began by going through all the old newspapers. I asked the children to cut out letters and words they might like to use in their stories. Once they had the content we could then focus on the illustrations.

Jenson said he wanted to make a book called, "I love Monsters." He was able to pick out individual letters but not complete words.

As well as doing a bit of English, we also covered world news. The picture below caught Jenson's eye so I explained what the article was about. It resonated with him because of the work we have done recently on Greece. We also spoke about what an earthquake is.

He tried his best to create the sentence below but struggled to put the letters in the correct order.

We covered lots of topics during this project, including geometry. I brought the protractor a few weeks ago for something else but never used it. It came in handy here though as I talked to Jenson about angles and explained what the difference is between a square and a triangle.

Once we had the shape of the mouth drawn, cut out and stuck down, Jenson used his ruler and a pencil to draw arms. We encourage plenty of ruler work. He doesn't read the numbers on it much, for now its just about getting him familiar with what one is and why it's useful. The numbers will come in time.

My lens cap from my camera made a handy circle template.

Jenson created triangles by using three dots and then joining them up to create three sides.

Here is Jenson's finished pop up monster book!

Here is the front cover to Jenson's book.

Wren also did really well making her pop up book, which had a very strong Skye, (Paw Patrol) theme to it! She showed great pen control when using the lid of the pritt stick to draw around to create a circle.